Ph.diva Of Rap

In Her Classroom, Tricia Rose Dissects Race, Class And Gender In Unique Fashion

March 17, 1998|By Teresa Wiltz, Tribune Staff Writer.

NEW YORK — The elevators aren't working. OK, well, technically they're working, but they're taking forever. Students of all hues are queued up, 10 abreast, clutching stacks of books as they wait for the two prehistoric lifts to crank open their doors and welcome the crush of funkily clad, pierced and tattooed postadolescent bodies.

But Tricia Rose, sporting neither piercings nor tattoos, has a history class to teach. And she's late. Which renders waiting for the elevators a moot point. So she takes to the stairs, seriously steep affairs challenging even the most stout of heart, huffing and puffing as she cracks jokes. Perhaps, she says, once they arrive at their destination--a classroom on the 5th floor--the visitor wheezing alongside her will perform an impromptu modern dance, thereby distracting her students while she catches her breath.

But Rose, author and assistant professor of History and Africana Studies at New York University, needs no distraction. As the first person in the country to write her PhD dissertation on hip-hop (the urban youth culture encompassing break dancing, graffiti and rap music) Rose uses her formidable scholarship skills to examine the sociological issues surrounding this new art form, placing her at the front of the pack of a new generation of academics dissecting issues of race, class and gender in America.

"She certainly is one of the stars of the new wave of young intellectuals," says Harvard professor and author Cornell West. "Her work on black popular culture as well as gender is on the cutting edge, no doubt."

The thirtyish Rose breezes into the classroom, apologizing for her lateness before launching into the day's discourse, a meditation on the role color, sex and privilege have played through the history of the New World. She's witty. She's provocative. She's blunt.

Flow is the key word here, a rap phrase which she defines in her book, "Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America," as "an ability to move easily and powerfully through complex lyrics as well as the flow of the music."

So she's not rhyming over some phat beats. She's certainly not dressed the part of a hip-hop head, with her makeup-free visage, sober navy slacks, grey cardigan and white Oxford shirt buttoned up to there. In this particular class, hip-hop doesn't come into play; most of the time, she's not even dealing with this century as she busily analyzes the politics of race as a construct, rather than a biological reality, that dates back to pre-slavery times.

Still, her lecture oozes the "flava" of hip-hop as she samples from scholarly riffs, her hands gesturing, body moving while she spins theories, layering thought upon thought and then abruptly changing course as she drives her point home.

Clearly, Rose, dubbed by Essence Magazine as "Hip-Hop's Reigning Ph.Diva," is having fun. And so, it appears, are her students.

Pop on a deeper level

One student, a self-professed "white boy rapper," confesses that he signed up for her class not so much because he felt the need to understand the history of racial privilege in America, but because he heard that Rose was really, really smart. And that she really, really, really knows rap.

"People really flock to her class because of that," says Aisha Bastiaans, an NYU junior who is taking two classes with Rose this semester. "It would be easy to say, `Tricia's really cool, she wrote that book, she's the hip-hop teacher.' But . . . she will bring in things that really resonate in our generation, like hip-hop, but she'll force us to look at it in a more complex way."

Thus, when a student mentions that those extra out-sized pants sliding past the hips are "da bomb," the class quickly turns into a discussion on the politics of style, and how hip-hop culture can be co-opted by the white mainstream, which then serves it up as a commodity in the free market, which brings into question whether the only way to free agency and economic empowerment in America is through capitalism.

"As far as academics go, Tricia's like a breath of fresh air," says Joan Morgan, author of the forthcoming book on hip-hop and feminism, "When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost" (Simon & Schuster).

"There's nothing Ivory Tower about her. It's like, `Who's this cool, black chick?' But there's nothing compromised as far as her academic credentials go. She brings the expertise of hip-hop to academics, but her interest in it really comes from this place of this girl who's from the Bronx."